Written on Stone
Written on Stone:
The Cultural Reception
of British Prehistoric Monuments
Edited by
Joanne Parker
Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric Monuments,
Edited by Joanne Parker
This book first published 2009
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2009 by Joanne Parker and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-1338-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1338-9
FOR RONALD HUTTON
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix
Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Joanne Parker
Chapter One............................................................................................... 10
Megaliths and Memory
Ronald Hutton
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23
The Devil”s Chapels: Fiends, Fear and Folklore at Prehistoric Sites
Jeremy Harte
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 36
Breaking Megaliths
Mark Gillings and Joshua Pollard
Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 49
Standing Stones and the Poetry of Prehistory
Joanne Parker
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 66
East Anglian Stones: Erratic Prehistories from the Early Twentieth
Century
David Matless
Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 82
Imagining the Past: Archaeological and Artistic Perspectives
Sam Smiles
Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 93
Pulp Archaeology: Megaliths in Popular Culture
Neil Mortimer
viii
Table of Contents
Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 100
Mystics and Mavericks: The Pagan Reinvention of Avebury
Andy Worthington
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 111
Supernatural Nationalism and New Age Ecology
Shelley Trower
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 128
Right Here! Right Now! - Prehistoric Monuments in Rock and Roll
Timothy Darvill
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 143
Children of the Stones: Prehistoric Sites in British Children”s Fantasy,
1965-2005
Charles Butler
Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 155
Processes and Metaphors: Constructing Perceptions of Prehistory
Bob Trubshaw
Bibliography............................................................................................ 163
Contributors............................................................................................. 175
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1.
“The Oxenham Arms Megalith”. Copyright Joanne Parker
(2009).
2.
“The Other Monolith in the Oxenham Arms”. Copyright Joanne
Parker (2009).
3.
Percy Robertson, “The Devil's Punchbowl”, Surrey Landscapes
(c.1890), plate vii.
4.
J. Charles Wall, “The Devil Digging the Devil’s Dyke”, in Devils
(London: Methuen, 1904), p. 114.
5.
William Stukeley, “An Abury Atto da Fe, May 20 1724”, in
Abury, A Temple of the Druids (London: W. Innys & R. Manby, 1743).
6.
Cover of W.A. Dutt, The Ancient Mark-stones of East Anglia:
Their Origin and Folklore (Lowestoft: Flood, 1926).
7.
“Stockton Stone”, from The Ancient Mark-stones of East Anglia
(1926), p. 16.
8.
“Chalk Mammoth Found at Great Glemham, Suffolk”, from J.R.
Moir, The Antiquity of Man in East Anglia (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1927), p. 118.
9.
Paul Nash, “Equivalents for the Megaliths” (1935), oil on canvas
457 x 660mm. Copyright Tate, London 2009.
10.
Still from The First Circus (Public domain, 1922).
11.
Detail from Captain Britain (Marvel Comics, 1976). Copyright
Marvel UK.
12.
William Stukeley's view of Avebury, laid out as a serpent. From
William Stukeley, Abury, A Temple of the Druids (London: W. Innys & R.
Manby, 1743).
x
List of Illustrations
13.
Arthur Pendragon (left) in a ceremony at Avebury, vernal
equinox 2003. Copyright Andy Worthington.
14.
Emma Restall-Orr (left) conducts a goddess ceremony at
Avebury's portal stones, vernal equinox 2003. Copyright Andy
Worthington.
15.
Yes (1973), Tales from Topographic Oceans. Cover artwork by
Roger Dean including images of Chichen Itza (Mexico), geoglyphs from
the Plain of Nazca (Peru), stones at Avebury and Stonehenge (Wiltshire),
Brimham Rocks (North Yorkshire), Last Rocks at Land’s End (Cornwall),
and Logan Rock near Treen (Cornwall). Copyright Atlantic Records.
16.
Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros (1999), Rock Art and the XRay Style. Cover artwork by Damien Hirst and others. Copyright Mercury
Records.
17.
Advertisement for the “Sonic Rock” festival (2005).
18.
Dick Bauch, “Silbury Hill”. Public domain (2005).
19.
“Newgrange”. Copyright Charles Butler (2007).
20.
John Matthews, “The Seven Circles of Annwn”, in Taliesin: The
Last Celtic Shaman (Inner Traditions, 2000). By permission of John
Matthews.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to John Matthews for permission to reproduce ‘The Seven Circles
of Annwn’, from Taliesin: The Last Celtic Shaman (Inner Traditions,
2000) and to the authors who contributed photographs and images from
private collections to the present volume. Every effort has been made to
contact other copyright holders.
Joanne Parker would like to acknowledge the support of the University of
Bristol and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the funding
which allowed the “Cultural Reception of Prehistoric Monuments”
conference to take place, and the University of Exeter for the research time
to develop the papers from that conference into the present volume. She
would also like to thank all those who attended the conference for making
it such a stimulating, supportive and entertaining event, and the
contributors to this volume for their enthusiasm, patience, and help.
Particular thanks are due to Shelley Trower who was unable to attend the
conference but who contributed a paper subsequently to complete the
present volume, and to Nick Groom for his support at the conference itself,
but also for his invaluable encouragement in turning the conference
proceedings into the present volume.
INTRODUCTION
JOANNE PARKER
Five years ago, I first visited South Zeal – the Dartmoor village where
I now live – and was shown two massy slabs of rock standing erect in the
Oxenham Arms Inn. One slab is in the little lounge behind the bar,
inconspicuously set into the wall (see Fig. i). The other stands proudly in
the centre of the breakfast room, as a pillar for the ceiling (see Fig. ii). One
of these rocks, I was told, was a 5000-year old megalith – part of a stone
circle around which, more than eight hundred years earlier, lay monks had
chosen to build the medieval hostelry which had preceded the current pub.
But which was the megalith, and which was simply a stone? The correct
answer was the stone set into the wall, which according to local legend is
so massy an edifice that its base has never been uncovered – despite
various attempts at excavation. But what of the other stone? No one seems
certain why the monastic builders, if they had built around a genuine
megalith, should have felt the need to add another upright stone to the
building – this time more prominently positioned.
It is possible that the second stone was a late addition, introduced at the
end of the sixteenth century when the Burgoyne family developed the
hostelry (assuming it ever existed) into a small manor house. Or it might
have been added even more recently, when the manor had become an inn,
to satisfy those visitors who had heard the tradition about the megalith but
felt less than fulfilled on seeing the stone itself, incorporated with little
dignity or drama into the wall. If so, the Oxenham Arms megalith would
not have been the first or the only stone to have disappointed sightseers. A
peeved visitor to Stonehenge in the late nineteenth century lamented: “the
average description of Stonehenge which sets forth the grandeur and
stupendous size of these stones, is pumped up fudge and flapdoodle of the
damnablest kind”.1 To avoid such disillusionment, day-trippers were
advised to approach the edifice with their carriage blinds down –
otherwise, viewing it at first from a distance it might “appear nothing, and
by the time you are at it all astonishment cease”.2 It seems that prehistoric
monuments require the viewer to bring to them as much, or more, meaning
as they find in the remains themselves. Certainly, I have often seen visitors
2
Introduction
to South Zeal admiring the breakfast-room upright, touching it tentatively
to sense a little of its ancient atmosphere. The fact that it is not the right
stone doesn’t seem to have any effect on the enjoyment that it gives, or
how authentic the experience feels to those willing and happy to be
impressed – which is perhaps unsurprising, since in geological terms at
least, the stone is certainly of a similar vintage to its more officially
acknowledged neighbour.
Earlier this year, I escorted an archaeologist friend to the Oxenham
Arms and was soberly informed that no part of the building was medieval
and that the stone in the bar wall was as unlikely to have ever formed part
of a stone circle as its rival in the breakfast room. This has not stopped me
from regularly showing the megalith to less sceptical acquaintances – or
from continuing to view it as a site of local interest, a village personality,
and an old friend. In a sense, that is what this book is about. The collection
of essays is not interested in the still unresolved questions about the origin,
original use, and authentic meaning of the prehistoric monuments of the
British Isles. It is not concerned with their prehistory. Rather it deals with
the history of the stones: with the ways in which they have been viewed,
the meanings that have been attributed to them, and the significant impact
that they have had over the centuries on British life and culture – from
motivating artists and authors, to acting as the source of inspiration for the
traffic roundabout.3 It is thus as interested in stones commonly believed to
be megaliths – like the Oxenham upright, or the foundation stones of the
chapel in South Zeal – as in the “real” stone rows and circles (many of
them re-erected in the nineteenth-century, in any case) that can be found
on the moor up above the village.
The Prehistory of the Monuments
In her recent study of Stonehenge, the historian Rosemary Hill
asserted: “Stonehenge does not belong to archaeology, or not to
archaeology alone”.4 Likewise, this book is not written primarily for
archaeologists – or not for the interest of archaeologists alone. It should
also be of interest to social and cultural historians, to those interested in
fine art, literature or film, and to anyone fascinated by the construction of
national, local, or counter-cultural identities. For this reason, while this is
not a book about the archaeological understanding of prehistoric
monuments, it is perhaps of use to begin with a very brief introduction to
the current archaeological thinking about those remains.5
South Zeal is not unusual in its wealth of prehistoric – or allegedly
prehistoric – monuments. Almost every parish in Great Britain can boast
Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric
Monuments
3
some relic of the prehistoric past. Those remains include stone circles,
stone rows, and single standing stones, as well as hillforts, boundary
earthworks, and hut circles, and more esoterically-named remains such as
dolmens (which have a large, mushroom-like capstone resting on four or
more legs), chambered cairns (a rounded or conical heap of stones used for
burials), barrows (circular or rectangular earth burial mounds), and henges
(a circular area enclosed by an earth bank and ditch). To get a basic idea of
their antiquity, as Julian Cope pointed out succinctly in his recent gazetteer
of Britain’s megaliths: “were Jesus Christ to have visited even the most
recent of those great megalithic Stone Age monuments, that sacred place
would have been older to Jesus than he is to us”.6
More specifically, the oldest of these remains are from the period
between 3200 and 2500 BCE. Those very early constructions comprise
mainly of dry-stone enclosures – perhaps used for livestock, perhaps for
permanent habitation, perhaps as temporary dwellings – as well as round
cairns, dolmens, and long barrows in which tens of bodies were interred
together. Both types of construction – the enclosures and the burials –
have been linked to the expansion of farming which took place around this
period.7 The more settled populace and the surplus labour that arose from
successful livestock-husbandry and agriculture (as opposed to hunting and
gathering) would have provided the manpower and the communityidentity necessary for monumental tombs, and the barrows may also have
served as territorial markers.
Several thousand tombs from that early period are still evident in the
British countryside. In the centuries after 2500 BCE, however, the
building of such edifices seems to have declined and new classes of
monument emerged. These included round barrows, in which far fewer
individuals were interred, and which took over from long barrows –
perhaps indicating a shift in social structures. Cursus monuments – long,
lozenge-shaped ditches with internal banks, that may have been
processional ways – also emerged at this time. And this was also the
period when henges began to be built – circular enclosures, looking rather
like defensive structures, but with an earth bank set outside (rather than
inside) a ditch, making them useless for defence. There is currently a
consensus that the henges were ritual monuments, but that most probably
had several functions, and changed their role over time. Some seem to
have been half-way between burial-monuments and enclosures. Timothy
Darvill suggests that they may have defined neutral territory where rival
social groups could meet: that they were “focal points in the complicated
exchange systems which were obviously developing at this period”.8 It is
also possible that the henges, because of the vast reserves of labour needed
4
Introduction
to construct them, were symbols of power and prestige – it’s been
suggested that Avebury, for instance, took 1.5 million man-hours to build.9
From around 2400BCE, a new sort of circular monument began to be
constructed – built not of earth, but of stone. The earliest stone circles to
be built were small and appeared only in the far north and west of Scotland
and England but by 1700 BCE, larger circles with widely-spaced stones
were being constructed across the British Isles. Both multiple circles and
single circles were common, and around the same period stone rows also
began to be built in some areas – often in conjunction with the circles.
Like the earlier cursus monuments, the rows were perhaps for processional
purposes. The circles themselves, like the earlier henges (inside which
they were sometimes built) are thought to have functioned as both meeting
places and ritual spaces. The care with which their stones were positioned
also suggests a new interest in celestial movements. Indeed, it has been
widely argued that they may have been aligned so as to allow observation
of the rising or setting of either the sun or the moon, and could thereby
have functioned as simple calendars for the timing of rituals.
Today, hundreds of stone circles survive in the British Isles. Less
disturbed by ploughing, livestock, and erosion than earthen structures, they
remain the most instantly recognisable and best-known of Britain’s
prehistoric monuments, and continue to attract widespread popular
interest. Best-known of them all, is Stonehenge in Wiltshire. Numerous
texts on the possible origin, use and meaning of Stonehenge have been
published to satisfy the popular interest in this monument – particularly in
the last three decades. Nevertheless, it requires at least a brief mention
here in order to clarify exactly how it differs from the other British stone
circles. As Aubrey Burl memorably states in the introduction to his study
of stone circles, “to begin a book about stone circles by referring to
Stonehenge is like starting a discussion about birds by describing the
Dodo. Neither is a typical example of its class. Both are above average in
size, of peculiar construction and both represent a dead-end in
evolution”.10
Stonehenge, as we know it today, was constructed gradually in three
phases, over the course of fourteen or fifteen hundred years – the
equivalent of nearly seventy generations at that period.11 As its name
suggests, when it began life around 3000BCE, it was not as a stone
monument but as a simple earthen henge, which was perhaps used as a site
for the internment of cremated remains.12 This monument may have
gradually fallen into disuse, but around five hundred years later, a wooden
structure was probably added it. It was not until the third phase of
construction – long after the completion of most of Britain’s stone circles
Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric
Monuments
5
– that stones were added to the monument, making it gradually
recognisable as the structure we see today. This phase itself took place
over around four hundred years, with the smaller “bluestones” and the
larger “sarsens” added gradually – in an order over which there is still
fierce disagreement. So Stonehenge was both used and constructed over a
far lengthier period than Britain’s other stone circles – a period stretching
from the stone age into the dawn of the bronze age. Unsurprisingly,
therefore, it also combines a far wider range of architectural styles. Its
horseshoe arrangement of stones is more like Breton monuments than
other British structures, while its famous “trilithons” – constructed from
two upright stones and one horizontal stone lintel – have been classified as
“an imitation of a timber ring”, rather than a relative of the more common
stone circle.13
The History of the Monuments
That, then, is the brief and rough outline of the prehistory of Britain’s
stone age and bronze age remains. This book continues their story into the
historic period, surveying over eight hundred years of rediscovery, study,
superstition, inspiration, fear, restoration, and destruction. In certain
periods, naturally, there was more widespread interest in prehistoric
remains than in others, as different generations saw their own anxieties,
beliefs and concerns reflected to different extents in the mysterious lives
of the prehistoric builders. Religious turmoil in the seventeenth century led
to a variety of responses to prehistoric remains. The Romantic Period
spawned a fascination with the obscure and primitive which led – among
other results in the nineteenth century – to the coining of the term
“megalith”, which still designates a large stone forming part of a
prehistoric monument.14 And in the 1960s and ’70s, the so-called “Celtic
Renaissance”, the development of environment activism, and the growth
of neo-pagan religions all contributed to a resurgence of the phenomenon
which the cultural historian John Michell has famously dubbed
“megalithomania”.15
Those identifiable periods of intensified interest are reflected in the
focus of many of this book’s chapters. Others address periods – like the
early twentieth century – when only a fascinating minority turned away
from more culturally dominant interests, and towards the remains of
prehistory. The chapters are arranged in broadly chronological sequence,
beginning with “Megaliths and Memory” – Ronald Hutton’s broad
introduction to the ways in which megaliths have been viewed across the
centuries. Hutton’s study opens by addressing the vexing problem of
6
Introduction
divining how medieval thinkers viewed prehistoric remains, before turning
its attention to the association between megaliths and druids which
developed in the early eighteenth century and survived tenaciously until
the 1950s. In particular, it challenges the powerful and persistent belief
that folk traditions about megaliths preserve echoes of pre-Christian belief
– or even of the rites for which the monuments were originally built – and
calls for a general rejection of this doctrine of cultural “survivals” among
archaeologists.
The second chapter is likewise interested in folklore, but addresses the
association of prehistoric remains not with druids, but with the devil. In
particular, “The Devil’s Chapels” traces the ways in which Satan displaced
giants and other mythical figures in folklore connected with prehistoric
sites. It investigates when exactly this shift took place, and why it did so in
England, but not in Wales or Ireland. Like the first chapter, it also attempts
the difficult task of discovering how prehistoric remains were viewed
before the seventeenth century – in this case, whether they were feared and
dreaded from an early date.
Chapter Three, “Breaking Megaliths” turns its attention to the
seventeenth century, when tens of megaliths were destroyed at Avebury.
The study reveals the extent and organisation of this operation, which must
have involved nearly all of the village’s population. It corrects the lack of
research into Avebury’s destruction, presenting it as a subject of study in
its own right and arguing for stone breaking as a lost “craft tradition”. Like
Ronald Hutton and Jeremy Harte, Gillings and Pollard also investigate the
connections between prehistoric remains and religion – in this case, the
links between stone breaking and non-conformism.
“Standing Stones and the Poetry of Prehistory” turns its attention to the
late eighteenth and the nineteenth century and to depictions of megaliths in
poetry and fiction. It examines the ways in which Romantic and Victorian
authors popularised antiquarian traditions of viewing megaliths, but also
the new conventions which they themselves introduced – many of which
endured until the late twentieth century, and some of which in turn
influenced modern archaeological descriptions of the stones.
The early twentieth century period is dealt with in Chapters Five and
Six, by David Matless and Sam Smiles. In “East Anglian Stones”, Matless,
like Ronald Hutton, turns his attention to interpretation of the folklore of
prehistoric remains as the survivals of primitive beliefs. This chapter
focuses, however, on the pervasiveness of that interpretation in the 1920s.
In particular, it examines the responses of early-twentieth-century regional
antiquarians to the lack of megalithic remains in East Anglia and Norfolk
by claiming that natural boulders moved during glaciation, had fulfilled
Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric
Monuments
7
the same function in prehistory. These claims are investigated in the
context of the development of regional and national identities, as well as
competing attempts at the time to locate the “birthplace of man”.
Chapter Six – “Imagining the Past” – turns to the 1930s, identifying it
as a cultural moment which produced both the concept of “artistic
modernism” and the notion of “British prehistory”. Smiles investigates the
surprising interactions between artists and archaeologists in this period –
both the interest of archaeologists like Stuart Piggott and Alexander
Keiller in the arts, and conversely the meetings with archaeologists and the
visits to prehistoric sites made by the artists John Nash and John Piper.
Like “Standing Stones and the Poetry of Prehistory”, this chapter
interrogates any notion of simplistic oppositions between artistic and
objective approaches to archaeology.
The following chapter, “Pulp Archaeology”, begins its survey of
prehistoric remains in the popular media from the 1950s. Neil Mortimer
traces the direct influence of archaeological discoveries upon cartoonists,
film-makers and television producers, as well as their use of the folkloric
motifs associated with megalithic monuments. In particular, the chapter
examines the prevalence of prehistoric sites in the genre of science-fiction
during the 1970s, and analyses their importance during that period as
cultural symbols, and more specifically as icons of Britishness.
The 1970s is also addressed in Chapter Eight, “Mystics and
Mavericks”, in which Andy Worthington identifies the different factors
which led, in that period, to Avebury being reinvented as a spiritual centre.
Worthington examines Avebury’s role in the “earth mysteries” movement
that was born in that decade; its use by neo-druidic orders in the 1980s;
and the interest that feminist activists took in the monument from the
1980s into the 1990s. Finally, he considers its use by anti-roads
campaigners – an interest which continues to the present day.
Worthington’s focus on Avebury, feminism and “new age” movements
is developed further in Chapter Nine, which examines the reception of
standing stones in Cornwall between 1970 and the present day. Shelley
Trower traces the association that folklore about living stones had with
Cornish nationalist discourses from the 1970s, looking in particular at the
fiction of Donald Rawe and Daphne Du Maurier, and the folklore
collections of Michael Williams. The chapter then investigates how
nationalist claims of connection with prehistoric sites became linked at the
end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first century with
feminism, environmentalism, and what might be dubbed “econationalism”.
8
Introduction
The period between the 1970s and the present day receives further
attention in chapters ten and eleven, which examine the relationship of
prehistoric remains to popular music and to children’s literature in those
decades. Timothy Darvill’s “Right Here! Right Now!” considers the use of
prehistoric remains in the popular music industry –as images for album
covers, as sets for live performance, and in the nomenclature of both bands
and albums. Darvill analyses the way in which monuments were used in
late-twentieth-century music to signify the past generally, but also to
suggest power and permanence on the one hand, or ambition and
megalomania on the other. Stonehenge receives particular focus, but is
considered alongside rock-art more generally, and in the context of
musical interest in the Pyramids and Ziggurats.
Darvill’s chapter demonstrates how new archaeological research and
the growth of counter-cultural interest in prehistory both fed into late
twentieth century popular culture. This is also the case in Charles Butler’s
“Children of the Stones”. Butler examines the use of prehistoric sites in
children’s fantasy fiction, tracing the way in which authors have drawn on
a mixture of folklore and mythology, the theories of early antiquaries like
William Stukeley, New Age beliefs about megaliths, and even recent
conflicts between archaeologists and protestors. In particular, the chapter
focuses on the novels of Alan Garner and Catherine Fisher, demonstrating
how in their works prehistoric monuments often function as a means of
connecting with the past – or as portals to other worlds.
The children who read Catherine Fisher’s fiction today may determine
the fate of Britain’s prehistoric heritage tomorrow. This book ends by
looking from children towards the future, with Bob Trubshaw’s
concluding chapter on “Processes and Metaphors” – a theoretical overview
of the ways in which we construct and reconstruct ideas about the past.
Trubshaw investigates how the meaning of prehistoric sites is produced
and consumed in today’s society – whether that is via the “folkloric”
transmission of information using the internet, the publication of academic
research, or as a result of the activities of neo-pagans at prehistoric sites.
Echoing Hutton’s chapter which opened this book, he suggests that our
mythmaking about the past should be viewed as a process. The chapter’s
ultimate argument also represents the rationale and principle of this book
as a whole: that the past is multiple and man-made. Thus, if we are to
effectively interpret and fully understand the prehistoric remains of that
past, a variety of disciplines and a range of approaches – both traditional
and unconventional – will need to work together. This jointly-authored
book – as a collaboration between archaeologists, folklorists, historians,
Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric
Monuments
9
journalists, English scholars and others – is, we hope, one step in that
direction.
Notes
1
Charles G. Harper, The Exeter Road (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899), 200.
Richard Fenton, A Tour in Quest of Genealogy through Several Parts of Wales,
Somersetshire and Wiltshire (London: Sherwood, 1811), 268.
3
On Stonehenge and the history of the traffic roundabout see Rosemary Hill,
Stonehenge (London: Profile, 2008), 80.
4
Hill, Stonehenge, 3.
5
This brief introduction draws on Timothy Darvill, Prehistoric Britain (London:
Routledge, 1987) and Aubrey Burl, The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and
Brittany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000).
6
Julian Cope, The Modern Antiquarian (London: Thorsons, 1998), 3.
7
See, for instance, Darvill, Prehistoric Britain, 48, 67.
8
Timothy Darvill, Prehistoric Britain, 88
9
Timothy Darvill, Prehistoric Britain, 92.
10
Aubrey Burl, The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany (Yale University
Press, 2000), 1.
11
Rosemary Hill, Stonehenge (London: Profile, 2008), 10
12
Aubrey Burl, The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany (Yale University
Press, 2000), 349.
13
Aubrey Burl, The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany (Yale University
Press, 2000), 371.
14
The term was first used by F. C. LUKIS in Archaeologia, 35 (1853), 233.
15
John Michell, Megalithomania (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982)
2
CHAPTER ONE
MEGALITHS AND MEMORY
RONALD HUTTON
The purpose of this contribution is to look at the ways in which British
megalithic monuments have been viewed through the centuries, at
different levels of society. It is an exercise in seeing how attitudes change
and traditions mutate. As such, it takes its place amid an exciting matrix of
related research, concerned with topics such as the history of the discipline
of archaeology, the folklore of prehistoric sites, the historical development
of ceremonial landscapes, and the manner in which structures surviving
from earlier periods seem to have been regarded in later prehistory and
early historic times. Some authors, notably Richard Hayman, have already
produced work that focuses directly on the themes of this paper. What is
attempted here is the construction of a broad framework for the history of
attitudes to megaliths in Britain, which in varying degrees builds on the
achievements of others, complements them, and provides alternative
perspectives to theirs.
Retrieving medieval viewpoints is extremely difficult, as contemporary
references are very few and material evidence equivocal. It is no longer
possible, as has often been done in the past, to project back folklore
recorded in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries and assume that it
represents timeless popular tradition.1 What is certain is that the medieval
British did not regard prehistoric monuments as a single class of
phenomena, any more than they do now. In a category of its own was
Stonehenge, which was clearly recognised as a unique structure built by
human hands, or at least for human purposes. The prevailing explanation
for it, apparently invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the early twelfth
century, was that it had been designed by the wizard Merlin (himself half a
demon by blood, and so equipped with superhuman knowledge) as a war
memorial to post-Roman Britons treacherously murdered by the invading
Saxons.2
Megaliths and Memory
11
Then there were barrows, some with megalithic chambers, which were
often recognised as burial mounds. This was simply because human bones
were commonly found in them when people dug into them, as were grave
goods, sometimes of precious metal. This perception was well established
by the opening of the medieval period. It is built into the most famous
Anglo-Saxon text of all, Beowulf, which could have been composed at any
point between the seventh and eleventh centuries, though an earlier date
seems currently more favoured. The climax of the story is based on the
existence of “a treasure in a huge burial mound, containing a hidden
passage” This treasure was “ancient”, representing the “immense ancestral
wealth of some great race”; it was “pagan gold”.3 The Life of St Guthlac,
which dates from the early eighth century, and so may be older or younger
than Beowulf, portrayed its hero as setting up a hermitage in a chamber in
an old earthen mound at Crowland in the Lincolnshire Fens. This structure
had been uncovered by men digging into the tumulus in the hope of
finding valuable objects. As the saint concerned had died only about
twenty years before the Life was written, the description is probably an
accurate one.4 The twelfth-century Viking inscriptions in the chamber of
Maes Howe attest that the association between ancient sepulchral mounds
and treasure was also found at the far north of Britain. To my reading, they
represent something like a Norse chain-letter, keeping a running joke
about a particular treasure going.5 During the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, the rifling of barrows was regarded as an accepted means of
gaining wealth, and one which the English royal government attempted to
control, by issuing licenses to individuals to carry out such work. The
most exalted of these was Richard, earl of Cornwall, the brother of Henry
VIII, who was authorised to open mounds on his Cornish lands and keep
the proceeds.6
Not all the attention paid to ancient burial mounds was primarily
concerned with grave goods. In or around the year 1178, the monks of St
Albans opened some near their abbey in the hope (which was fulfilled) of
finding an ancient skeleton which they could identify with the martyr
Amphibalus, and add to their collection of saintly relics.7 From the
beginning of the medieval period, also, tumuli were sometimes regarded
specifically as the resting places of heroes or giants: the Historia
Brittonum, completed in Wales in 830, identified a large one in what is
now northern Monmouthshire or southern Herefordshire as traditionally
the grave of Anir or Amr, “son of the warrior Arthur”.8
Finally, there were standing stones, whether singly, or in alignments,
or in circles. The problem here is that there seems to be no solid evidence
that anybody in medieval Britain thought that any of these, except
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Stonehenge, was a monument. In the mid seventeenth century the general
opinion seems to have been that the huge megalithic complex of Avebury
was a natural outcropping of stones.9 This could have been a traditional
perception of such structures, and the explanation of why they apparently
find no place in medieval literature. It is plausible that, to a society which
believed the whole earth to be God’s creation, the notion that natural
phenomena should appear shaped by an intelligence presented none of the
difficulties that it does today. After all, until the opening of the nineteenth
century fossils were commonly considered to be animal forms
spontaneously generated from the rocks, or ornaments planted in the
interior of the earth by the deity as flowers were planted in the exterior.10
This problem is linked to another: that there seems to be equally little
solid evidence that any person in medieval Britain regarded prehistoric
circles or tombs as religious structures. For many years it has been
suggested that some of the stones at Avebury were buried in the fourteenth
century as part of a campaign to violate a heathen temple. Recently,
Joshua Pollard and Andrew Reynolds have argued that the burial of stones
was a haphazard business spread over a long period; so that there is no
evidence for any such campaign.11 Paul Ashbee has noted that the
chambered barrows of Kent were systematically wrecked in the late
thirteenth century, by people who came from outside the locality, and
favoured the hypothesis that this was an act of religious desecration. He
himself, however, also considered the possibility that it may have been the
work of treasure-hunters, and this remains open; his readiness to accept a
spiritual motivation for the damage was explicitly influenced by what he
then regarded as the proven example of such action at Avebury.12
What is clear is that, once the middle ages had ended, patterns of
interpretation both began to alter and to diverge between nations. By the
1520s, the Scottish historian Hector Boece was confident that stone circles
had been pagan ceremonial monuments. Furthermore, and most
significantly, he stated that this was by his time a generally accepted belief
among his compatriots: these “roundis of stanys” were “callit the ald
temple of goddis be ye vulgare pepill”.13 Perhaps this was simply because
those in the hinterland of Aberdeen (his own university) looked even less
“natural” than most. They form a large, thickly-concentrated group known
to archaeologists today as “recumbent-stone circles”, because they have a
standard feature of a massive block lying in the southern part of the
circumference between two unusually tall uprights. This looks very much
like an altar, which may be just what it was. The recognition that they
were ancient religious monuments persisted in early modern Scotland. In
1692 another leading scholar at Aberdeen, James Garden, could declare
Megaliths and Memory
13
that the “general tradition” concerning stone circles was that “they were
places of worship and sacrifice in heathen times”, and that “the vulgar”
called the recumbent stone “the altar”.14 Whether this was a tradition
confined to Aberdeenshire, and whether it had been present all through the
middle ages, the records do not tell. As for the Irish, their native literary
and oral tradition gave a major role to the Druids, as the priests and sages
of pre-Christian Ireland. There was a firm tradition among some of them,
by the early seventeenth century at the latest, that prehistoric chambered
tombs had been Druid altars.15
As Daniel Woolf has recent emphasised, the sixteenth century
produced a new consciousness among English scholars of the alien nature
of the past and of a relative chronology in it. This served to separate them,
in a novel fashion, from perceptions of it held by people in general.16 In
the case of megaliths, popular and learned attitudes certainly both
developed and diverged, but the divergence was also between English (and
Welsh), Scottish and Irish scholars. The Scots picked up a new enthusiasm
for Druids, as heroic and patriotic national ancestors, that had been
pioneered by the Renaissance Germans and French. It was the Auld
Alliance between Scotland and France that took this straight from Paris to
Aberdeen, and so in the 1530s the Druids were grafted onto the Scottish
disposition – whether old or very recent – to believe that stone circles had
been pagan temples.17 Partly in reaction against this Scottish enthusiasm,
English and Welsh intellectuals took a different tack. Some, such as
William Camden and Walter Charleton, attributed specific stone circles to
the Danes, as part of a growing realisation, propelled by the energy of
Danish and Swedish antiquarians, that megalithic monuments also existed
in Scandinavia. Inigo Jones and John Webb proposed the Romans as the
builders of Stonehenge.18 The Welsh continued to ignore their own
prehistoric remains, concentrating on their medieval bardic literature as the
expression of their nationhood.19
In the same period, West Country folklore, from Somerset to Cornwall,
enlisted them in a new cause: that of sabbatarianism. This process could
only have commenced with the campaign against Sunday games and
dances, which appeared in the later reign of Elizabeth. The common theme
of the new folk tradition was that stone circles represented groups of
sportspeople or revellers who had been petrified for enjoying their
pastimes on Sunday. It may have been spread by preachers, but the
apparent complete absence of any reference to it in surviving sermons
suggests that in large part, at least, it was a genuine folk motif. It is first
recorded in Cornwall in 1602, specifically as a belief of “the country
14
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people”, and was attached to several monuments in the region by the early
eighteenth century.20
Political and intellectual developments were, however, working against
this diversity. The British peoples were drawing closer together, in a
process epitomised by the union of England and Scotland in 1707. At the
same time the pace of antiquarian research was quickening, and becoming
much more collaborative and argumentative, with societies being founded
to serve it in the metropolis. As a result, the period between 1660 and 1740
saw a growing realisation among English and Welsh intellectuals that their
land contained a large number of ancient stone structures which demanded
explanation. The result was a series of arguments, in which the claims of
Druids, Romans and Danes were deployed against each other, with equal
success.21
How far any of this rubbed off on popular perceptions is hard to say,
but two particular case studies suggest that much of it did. At the Rollright
Stones, Camden’s theory that the monuments were a Danish sepulchre got
mixed up in the seventeenth century with a local legend about a petrified
king.22 At Avebury, the growing interest of antiquaries in the stones was
followed immediately by a systematic campaign by villagers to destroy
them. Mark Gillings and Joshua Pollard have demonstrated that the scale
of effort involved went far beyond that needed for simply utilitarian
purposes such as getting building stone.23 Furthermore, the stone breakers
were mostly Protestant dissenters who had concentrated in the village to
evade the Clarendon Code that persecuted their meetings in their longerestablished centres.24 It seems reasonable to conclude that, having got the
point that they were living around a pagan temple, their response was to
try to annihilate it.
In the tussle among antiquarians, it was the proponents of the Druids
who won, after almost a hundred years of disputation. This was because of
a particular sequence of events. It began with the formation of the Royal
Society to promote British science at the Restoration. This attracted Scots,
who told their English colleagues about their long-held belief that
megaliths were the work of Druids. One of those colleagues was the
Wiltshire squire John Aubrey, who applied the theory to British
monuments in general, inspired by the surveys of national monuments
made by Scandinavians. The Druid theory was, however, too novel for
most of the English, and Aubrey was too timid and disorganised to publish
his ideas. Instead, they circulated among scholars, mostly at Oxford,
between the 1660s and 1730s, until they found an adherent able, longlived and well-connected enough to give them victory. This was William
Stukeley, who won it for them almost single-handed, in his two famous
Megaliths and Memory
15
books on Stonehenge and Avebury published in the early 1740s. What was
so impressive about them was the unprecedented quantity of detailed
fieldwork behind them, itself propelled by the intense religiosity that had
eventually turned Stukeley into an Anglican parson.25
With arguments of that quality now behind them, the Druids could take
advantage of the cultural context that had built up in their favour during
the past hundred years. They represented some of the very few historical
figures that the newly united British state could have in common. One of
its biggest problems was that the traditional heroes of its component
peoples had mostly achieved their fame in conflict with each other. The
Druids now supplied them with a united and (thanks to their new
association with megaliths) tangible and visually impressive past.
Furthermore, the linkage made by some writers between Druids and wild
natural places, especially oakwoods, exactly suited the new literary cult of
the beauty and wisdom of the natural world, which was a hallmark of the
early Romantic Movement. To the more prosaic sort of Georgian, the
association of Druids with oaks burnished their patriotic credentials still
further, as these were the trees that, above all others, built the royal navy
and thus guaranteed British power. The result was that the second half of
the eighteenth century saw a celebration of Druids as wise and noble
ancestors among the Scots, Welsh and English alike, embodied in
literature, music, drama, painting and sculpture.26
It seems to have pervaded the whole of British society within about
forty years. By the 1790s, Welsh country people were happy to identify
any standing stone as a Druidical monument, if an English tourist showed
interest in it.27 In that decade a Glamorgan stonemason, Edward Williams,
forged documents that purported to prove that the Welsh bardic tradition
preserved Druidic teachings and the form of the ceremonies that had taken
place in those circles.28 In London in 1781 a master builder founded an
Ancient Order of Druids to supply middle and working class men with a
safe space in which they could combine conviviality with a taste for
music. By 1830 it had lodges all over England, being especially strong
among artisans and factory workers in the new industrial areas of the
Midlands and North.29 It should not be wondered that the message that
Druids and megaliths were synonymous, and summed up ancient Britain
between them, should have travelled so fast between classes and regions.
It was provided not only in all sorts of print, but in stage productions and
civic sculpture in towns. John Fisher’s delightfully dotty musical, The
Masque of the Druids, was a huge popular success at Covent Garden in the
winter of 1774-5.30 The growth of domestic tourism in the final decades of
the century ensured that the yokels of any district with impressive
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megaliths would find themselves regularly supplied with educated visitors
anxious to inform as well as question them.
The first half of the nineteenth century represented the high noon of the
British identification of themselves, and prehistoric monuments, with
Druids. One of the most convenient aspects of the latter is that the Greek
and Roman texts that described them had provided two different images
with equal utility. In one, the Druids had been great philosophers,
scientists, teachers and priests, promoting peace between their own people
and rallying resistance to foreign foes. As such, they were easily
assimilated to Christianity, by suggesting that they had practised the true
religion of the Old Testament patriarchs. Either they had simply retained
this in the dispersal of humanity after Noah’s Flood, or they had learned it
from Abraham before being shipped to Britain by the Phoenicians. It
should never be forgotten that the megaliths most familiar to the British
between the sixteenth and ninteenth centuries were those in the Bible,
erected by Jacob, Moses and Joshua as memorials to people and events.
This made the assimilation of the Druids to the Hebrew patriarchs very
easy.31
Opposed to this was the other view of Druidry in the ancient texts, as a
religion of gloom, ignorance and gore, with a concentration on human
sacrifice. This could also be assimilated to the Bible, by representing it as
another aspect of the “abomination of the heathen”, and megaliths as idols.
In this reading, Britain was rescued from the Druids by the twin improving
forces of Roman civilisation and Christian piety. It was an attitude more
attractive to those with an adversarial approach to religion, and it had a
natural affinity with the evangelism and imperialism that were two
hallmarks of nineteenth-century culture. In the new ideology of progress,
getting rid of the Druids could be regarded as the apprenticeship that fitted
the British for reforming or eradicating native religions in Asia, Africa or
Polynesia.32
Sometimes the impact of this second view on popular belief can be
precisely identified. In 1754 the clergyman and antiquary William Borlase
published his famous book that linked many prehistoric sites in Cornwall
to gruesome scenes of human sacrifice. A hundred years later, local people
told tales of how some of those places had been occupied by ogres who
sacrificed human captives.33 At Pontypridd and Llantrisant in Glamorgan,
during the nineteenth century, some local professional men and artisans
established a revived Druidic religion, which blended Christianity with
Hindu and other beliefs to recreate the patriarchal faith of the Old
Testament. They were roundly denounced by local preachers, and today it
Megaliths and Memory
17
is still said that a cliff in the neighbourhood is haunted by the ghosts of
murderous Druids, still trying to lure victims to their deaths.34
It is also possible to find examples of the opposite process in action,
whereby popular tradition resisted an attempt to impose images of Druids
upon it. One of the best comes from Nottingham, where, in 1850, an
anonymous author, supported by a local newspaper, published a
reinterpretation of some of the cave systems for which the city is noted.
Folk tradition held that Robin Hood and his band had stabled their horses
in some of these. Folk memory held that some of the features associated
with them, that suggested they had been worked by human hands, were of
relatively recent date. The author of the pamphlet set out to reshape these
traditions, and to claim for Nottingham a large and impressive Druidical
monument to compare with the megaliths possessed by many other regions
but sadly missing from his own county. He had read most of the principal
authors on Druidry to publish in the previous hundred and thirty years, and
applied a medley of their ideas to suggest that feature after feature of the
caves and some associated earthworks could be taken as evidence for
Druid practice. He was uncomfortably aware that his enterprise was at
variance with local beliefs, and lambasted the latter as “idle tales”,
informing his readers that “verbal testimony is not always to be relied on,
and, therefore, such desultory reports may be rejected”.35 His efforts seem
to have been in vain, for the notion that the phenomena concerned
represented an imposing ancient monument took no root in the city.
The consensus that megaliths were Druid temples fractured at the top
of intellectual society in the 1860s, as a result of the importation of more
Danish ideas. This time the latter emphasised the division of prehistory
into successive stone, bronze and iron ages, each one produced by the
invasion of a new, culturally superior people. This framework pushed the
Druids to the margins of prehistory, as the priests of the last, Iron Age,
invaders. It thereby broke their link to megaliths, which were now
recognised as Neolithic or Bronze Age. This view suited the growing
Victorian preoccupation with racial differences, and fitted the experience
of colonial expansion across North America, Australia and parts of Africa.
It was also, however, directed against a view of the past that took the Bible
as the starting point for any narrative. As such, it was coupled with the
new geology, with its revelation of the great age of the earth, and the
theory of the evolution of species. It empowered a set of secular-minded
antiquarians to displace the clerical scholars who had been dominant in
writings upon ancient Britain for the past two centuries, and still ran the
universities. There was, in fact, no pressing need for the Druids to leave
the megaliths: it was quite possible to argue for a continuity of religion
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across invasions, and a few authors did. The latter were, however, arguing
against the intellectual tide: the Druids were expelled because they had
been too successfully absorbed into the earlier, Bible-based, scholarship.36
The old orthodoxy – which associated Druids and megalithic structures
– had been accepted by people in general within a few decades. Despite a
much more professional group of national intellectual authorities, with
much better national systems of communication, it took a hundred years
for the new view of prehistory to take hold. By the 1870s it was already
firmly accepted by the scholarly establishment, but at the end of the
century members of the latter were complaining bitterly about the
attachment to Druids exhibited by an ignorant and wilful populace.37 In the
1950s they were still doing the same thing;38 in fact, it was only in the
1960s that a mixture of books, radio and television finally got the midVictorian message across.
This was partly because the Druids had long, literally, remained on the
map. It was not until the 1920s that the Ordnance Survey stopped calling
prehistoric stone rings “Druidical circles” on the one-inch maps which had
by then been for decades the mainstay of the rambling public. It was
mainly, however, because the new scholarship had nothing to put in the
Druids” place. Being confined to material remains, it could not supply the
public with any confident reconstructions of the beliefs that had raised the
megaliths or the rites that had occurred in them. Late twentieth-century
novelists who have set stories in the era of Stonehenge, such as David
Burnett, Edward Rutherford and Bernard Cornwell, have mostly recycled
the old image of bloodthirsty Druidry without calling the people concerned
Druids.39 The main diference is that, whereas Victorian novelists had
depicted women as innocent victims of Druidical savagery, in the recent
stories, they are as likely to be found wielding the sacrificial knife as going
under it.
Nor can it be a coincidence that, as soon as the general public finally
let go of Druids when contemplating prehistoric monuments, a luxuriant
new alternative archaeology immediately sprang up. This also centred on
wise astronomer priests, concerned with channelling stellar and earth
energies in stone circles pretty well exactly as Stukeley’s Druids had done.
Like that of the formerly imagined Druids, moreover, this system tended
to collapse ritual structures from all parts of prehistory, and from early
Christianity, into a united whole. All that was new was the addition of
long, straight, invisible lines upon the landscape, linking the tangible
ancient monuments and representing real or imagined currents of natural
power; these “leys” were effectively spiritual equivalents to the railways
and motorways that link modern centres of political, commercial and